Tuesday, June 7th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Imagineer Systems ships mocha Pro 5


Originally posted on 2 June 2016. Scroll down for news of the commercial release.

Imagineer Systems has posted videos of the features in mocha Pro 5, the next update to its planar tracking software, including a new After Effects plugin costing just half the price of the standalone edition.

The update, which also adds GPU-accelerated tracking, improved Python scripting, and roto shape export to Fusion and Silhouette, was first announced at NAB last year.

Focused on performance and pipeline integration
According to Imagineer Systems, the update is “focused on core improvements for speed and accessibility”, improving mocha’s performance on 4K projects and integration into production pipelines.

In the latter category, Python scripting has been improved to make it easier for VFX facilities to integrate mocha Pro with their asset-managment and renderfarm-management systems.

New plugin options for common compositing and editing apps
Equally significantly, the software will become available as a plugin for key compositing and editing packages, including After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Composer, Nuke and DaVinci Resolve.

The plugin versions can read media in any format the host application supports, and the mocha tracking data is saved as part of the host project file.

The integration can also interact with other third-party plugins, as shown in this video of the workflow for tracking a VR project inside After Effects with the help of Mettle’s SkyBox plugin.

Exchange roto and tracking data with other software
In addition, mocha Pro 5 can exchange roto shapes with Silhouette, and export roto shapes to Fusion.

The software can now export planar motion tracking data as a corner pin import to to HitFilm 4 Pro, Fxhome’s all-in-one editing and compositing software, which also includes a cut-down version of mocha.



GPU-accelerated planar tracking
In the category of core improvements for speed the software now supports GPU-accelerated tracking, with Imagineer claiming “2x speed improvements” in its early tests.

The demo above shows a more modest 30% improvement in solving time, and that’s on Nvidia’s top-of-the-range 24GB Quadro M6000, although the implementation uses OpenCL, so it should work on any GPU.


Updated 7 June: mocha Pro 5 is now shipping. Pricing for the standalone edition, available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, remains unchanged at $1,495; the new plugin option costs $695.

At the minute, the plugin version only supports After Effects, Premiere Pro and Media Composer, with Nuke and DaVinci Resolve still to come. The plugin is also Windows and OS X only, with Linux “coming soon”.

Imagineer has posted a detailed comparison table for the two editions and a video on its new licensing system, intended to make it easier to (de)activate mocha Pro when moving installations between machines.


Read more about the new features in mocha 5 Pro on Imagineer Systems’ website